‘Ain’t no sissies on this trail!’
[In honor of the nap I just
took in my 18th floor, air-conned hotel room (and the strange,
vaguely terrifying backpacking-related nightmare that accompanied it) I thought
it time to put down my thoughts on hiking the Knobstone Trail, Indiana’s
longest footpath at over 50 miles.
Usually I’d write 20+ pages on such a trip, but I will endeavor, in the
interest of readership, to keep it to one semi-lengthy blog. Enjoy at thy discretion.]
When I met the older couple,
late on my fifth day out, I was resting, tired after a brief climb but by no
means as physically devastated as I’d been.
I’d just had a great lunch stop and had been able to air out my reeking,
aching feet, filter water, eat a packet of Saag Paneer with tortillas (beyond
delicious) and linger over my map and a cup of mint hot cocoa. Unlike the previous three afternoons, no
thunderstorms were looming. And, judging
by the isobars on my topographic map, the absolute worst of my climbs and dips
were behind me. Mile 39 and I was
feeling…well maybe not fine, but at least okay.
They passed me in their white
pickup on their small forest road (Pull Tight), then backed up to see if I was
all right.
“I’m fine,” I said, meaning it
for the first time in days. “Just taking
a rest.”
They then asked me if I needed
anything, and I told them that the flint strips on my waterproof matches had
worn out, making any match lighting an adventure, but, other than that, I was
good to go.
“Hold on,” the man said. “We live just right up here. We’ll be right back.”
And they were, bearing gifts:
several books of matches, a package of Little Debbie Devil Squares, and, Good
God, two bottles of ice cold Gatorade.
As I attacked the first bottle (much gusto, little restraint) the man
talked about the Knobstone, which he’d just through-hiked with his nephew a few
weeks earlier.
“I’m 56 years old,” he said,
“and twenty pounds overweight, and out of shape…I lost fourteen pounds and my
blood pressure went down 28 points – in five days.”
Beginning the second bottle I
agreed that, like, yeah, it was a toughy.
“Are you coming from Delaney
or Spurgeon [the two north-end trailheads]?” he asked.
“I’m coming from Deam Lake,” I
said.
His whole demeanor
changed. “You’re coming from the south!” he said. “Then you already know about those twenty
miles of hell?”
“I do,” I said, smiling.
“Have you ever seen any hiking
trail like that?”
I admitted, while endeavoring
to fit my head inside the Gatorade bottle to get the last few drops, that I had
not.
He then proceeded to tell me
stories of the army ranger he’d encountered, a man who’d hiked the entirety of
the Appalachian Trail, who’d told him that he’d never hiked a trail as
difficult as the KT, and the two female tri-athletes who had had to quit the
trail after their bodies had literally shut down. He finished, pointing northward, behind me,
with a dismissive gesture: “There’s nothing to worry about between here and the
north end of the trail; all the hard part is behind you.”
“That’s good to know,” I said,
smiling more.
“Ain’t no sissies on this
trail,” he concluded, more accurately than eloquently, and I nodded in laughing
agreement, especially considering, for five days, I had not seen another soul
on it.
Then they drove off again,
leaving me, as I’d been for most of the previous week, completely alone.
And reinvigorated.
It was not the Gatorades, my
first cold drinks in five days, that made me feel this way…although they did
certainly help. Nor was it the longest
human contact I’d had since leaving Hyde Park on Saturday morning. Nor was it the achingly beautiful summer
twilight. Nor was it the knowing that
the rest of my hike was to be easy, mostly perfunctory, a dénouement in an almost literal sense.
No. I felt reinvigorated because I had
verification, from another, that what I had done was hard. Strange thing, human nature: the fact that I
knew that others who had trod this path had had struggles similar to mine –
that they had suffered – made me feel
good, made me feel strangely
vindicated, made me feel happy. I set off, quickly, lithely, with a spring in
my step that had theretofore been wholly absent.
*
Being an introvert, I’ve
always felt that all my coolest moments happen when no one is around to see
them. When I am with the other humans, I
often feel awkward, talk way too much, say inappropriate things, feel cagey and
ill-at-ease. It’s not that I don’t love
people – I do. It’s just that I’m not
great around them. And I’ve always
thought that, were a hidden camera to follow me around, a la The Truman Show, I would come off as
cool, collected, dignified, awesome…unlike I do in public.
While hiking the Knobstone,
alone as anyone in the world however, I thought none of these things. There were very few moments (before my
conversation on the side of Pull Tight anyway) when I felt cool at all. I felt hot, stinky, weak, sore, wet, worried,
tired, irritated, and beyond my limits…often all at the same time. I felt, in short, totally humbled, and though
I knew I’d finish the trail (a completist by
nature, it would have taken a broken leg or something similarly
catastrophic to stop my doing that), I wondered, on several hundred occasions,
why I was doing it, and why it was sooooo
not fun.
I started off on Saturday,
June 15, alone at vespers, my green Kelty pack an overstuffed behemoth on my
back. Never had I hiked a trail so long,
never had I set out to hike so long a time alone. Furthermore, the KT has a (well-earned) reputation
as a dry trail, so I really stocked up on the water – about 15 pounds in my
pack and probably six more around my neck in my new four-quart canteen. Never, ever has my pack felt so heavy; it was
so weighty, in fact, that I had to stop every five minutes to readjust the
straps as they kept pulling loose. I
made only two miles my first day out before finding a cool campsite high on a
ridge.
However, though my fire was
too hot for the hot night, and though my pile of food looked ridiculously huge
when piled up, all was well. The sounds
of the trees moving against each other in a night wind (a sound like women
crying) and a whippoorwill lulled me to repose.
The next day, Sunday, June 16,
my birthday, is when things went south – literally. Miles 4.5 through 8 of the trail were closed
due to tornado damage (I knew this) and I planned to hike around the closed
portion on forest roads. Well, first, my
canteen failed cataclysmically: the cheap strap was not designed to support the
weight of four quarts of water, and it snapped.
I was able to retie it and make about 1/3 of a mile before it snapped
again. Then, I reached the roads (after
the first of the trip’s many serious climbs) and quickly realized that they had
no intention of doing what my map said they should…a road called Hilltop, for
example, was supposed to go through to a another (Flatwood) but ended at
someone’s driveway gate. Luckily, I
ended up on a horse trail, where I met a guy named Gary and a horse named
Woody. They gave me great directions back
to the Knobstone – directions that cut about five miles off of my proposed
route, directions I was able to follow to the letter – and I rejoined the KT
right at mile 8.
However, I am dumb. I was right where I needed to be, still early
in the afternoon, ready to rock, but I got completely
turned around just as the first of the trip’s many thunderstorms arrived (precluding
any navigation by the sun). I was sure I
was facing south and thus turned around, trying to find where the trail
continued north – actually turning south and into the heart of the tornado
damage when I did so. Of course the
trail was blocked, so I set off on a parallel horse trail thinking I was
heading northeast, actually headed southwest into a trail-less hinterland, lightning flashing and rain
lashing. Needless to say, I spent the
next several hours lost, hiking down bulldozer paths and ghosts-of-trails,
losing my grip, feeling, tangibly, the relaxed schedule I had planned for
myself at the outset of the trip becoming more and more frenetic, lamenting the
amount of miles I would have to do over the coming days to catch up. Admitting defeat at twilight, I set out to circle
all the way back to where I had started and take the roads (a prodigious
undertaking), but, luckily, I met a group of ATV riders who directed me back to
the trail (right where I had been earlier) and told me that I should be able to
get through. Then, shortly thereafter,
the sun came out, and I realized my directional folly. Tired, footsore, and depressed, I continued,
in deep twilight, northbound on the KT, only at mile 8 after 14+ miles and 24
hours of backpacking.
I made it all the way past
mile 10 that night – not fun but I had to; the trail was wet and a bit
overgrown (I was soaked) and I could not find anything resembling a suitable
campsite. I don’t mind, at all,
backpacking alone, but I like to have camp established, the tent pitched, the
fire stoked, and dinner eaten by dark when I do so. That was not to be possible on this night,
however, and when I finally accepted this (and darkness had fallen fully), I
sat down in a small, dripping clearing, put my head in my hands, and wished I
could cry. I called my wife, hoping to
whine to her lamentably, but she was working and did not answer.
After regaining some semblance
of composure, I got up (what else was there to do?) and continued my climb, up
and up, away from civilization and into the dripping darkness. I finally settled, around 11 p.m., on a damp clearing
off the side of the trail. I made camp
and ate shells and cheese and then slunk to my tent, feeling lonely and very
sad. Happy Birthday!
One thought kept me going,
however: I could make many miles over the coming days…
Little did I know, however,
that I had camped on the cusp on the aforementioned twenty miles of hell.
I was to do 12.5 miles on
Monday, the first part of it through a sultry soup of heat and swarming
insects, the second through two soaking thunderstorms. My boots were saturated (and were to continue
thusly for the duration of the trip), as were my shorts, leading to the first
round of painful chafing (ahem…diaper rash).
Too, I had begun to itch, badly, a result of many, many encounters with ticks
and chiggers. I arrived at a suitable
campsite in a valley at dusk during a lull in the rainstorm, and was able to
get the tent set up and get into some dry clothes (just) before the rain commenced
copiously. I had to cook and eat dinner
in the tent, wondering throughout the night if the murmuring voices I fancied I
heard beneath the hum of the rain were real or in my head…couldn’t, at that
time, decide which was worse.
The next day dawned sunny and
hot. I’d overslept, a lot, but still
vowed to enjoy my lovely valley-bottom campsite…and so did. Thus, I got onto the trail after noon (d’oh!). The trail quickly climbed out of the valley
onto a flat ridge top…upon which I was to hike, flatly, for nearly two
miles. I felt so good then I even called
my wife while hiking, and was able to converse with her without huffing too
heavily… “If the trail is like this, I will make twenty miles today,” I told
her shortly before I lost reception.
Mile 24…started by dropping
like a stone down into a deep valley and then immediately climbing out of
it…before repeating the process. Then I
missed a marker and ended up doing a steep loop down into a valley and back
up...right back to where I had started my descent. (My reaction to hiking for an hour only to
find myself at the same parking area again is unprintable.) There was scarcely ten flat feet of trail the
whole mile (ahem…two miles) – and that was just the beginning.
All day, I found myself
descending into valleys only to immediately climb out again…creating such a
feeling of futility. I was spent when I
stopped in a deep valley for a very late lunch, chagrinned when I saw the
telltale clouds and heard the faraway rumbling thunder of another approaching
storm. I strove on, reciting ancient
Chinese Tang poetry to myself as the tempest arrived in myriad gusts, dropping
huge braches and deadfall onto the valley floor all around me, soaking me and
my boots once again.
The rain did drop the temps
from the low 90s into the mid 60s, and it did lend a degree of ambience to my
endeavors (a misty ridge top at mile 29 was particularly lovely, even though I
did daydream of sitting in a hot tub throughout, and the cloud-parting sunset over
Elk Creek Lake made me think thoughts of heaven) so it was not all bad. I filtered water out of Elk Creek Lake during
the stormy gloaming, wondering, as I looked out over the lake to the
surrounding hills and the acres of empty parking spaces, if I were inhabiting a
world devoid of humans. Passing a
perfect campsite (too close to the parking area, I thought) I strode off, again
hiking by flashlight into the dark. The
trail climbed and climbed silently, and I carried on, thinking that I would
find a lovely hilltop campsite with a view.
Wrong. The trail crested at a
forest road and then immediately descended back into the woods. As it was again after 11 p.m., I thought
about just sitting up in the small parking spur off the road, but something
about that creeped me out…I thought of how little I would want to meet anyone
who’d be out on such a road at 3 a.m., and also of a ghost story I had read as
a kid wherein a spirit had run down such a road, invisible, creating loud,
echo-less footsteps. Thus I retreated a
bit, back down the hill, to another small clearing that had never been used as
a site. Such loneliness beset me as I
made camp, cooked dinner, etc… And something akin to terror beset me when a
huge tree fell with a series of cracks and monolithic tremblings sometime
during the wee hours of the ultra-still night.
“Why,” I wondered aloud, “am I doing this?”
The next day – more huge
climbs followed by more huge drops, again, again, again. The trail was rerouted onto a high, scorching
ridge top, whereupon, spent by early afternoon, I sank down and contemplated my
own mortality and the fact that, as I told Patricia laughingly, there may be no
God.
Then, however, after a last
huge drop, I came to the John Stewart Oxley Memorial Trailhead, where (as I’ve
already mentioned) I had a great, therapeutic lunch stop. And this is where, dear reader, we came in.
My last night on the trail was
everything that I go backpacking for: I found a flat, well-established site by
a riverbed and was able to get the tent up, my dinner cooked, and a watery fire
going before darkness fell. I spent the
night huffing life into the little fire and reading, and then slept like a
stone into the sunny morning.
The last day’s hike was easy
and uneventful (even though, as a completist, I felt compelled to day hike the
remaining loops, which were more challenging than scenic). My pal Jeremy Weber, on his day off, met me
at Delaney Park, more than a three hour drive from his house, to take me back
to my car at the southern trailhead.
“I hiked the Knobstone,” I
said, exhaustedly when I met him.
“You smell like it,” he said.
I took a shower at the
bathhouse…refreshing even though I had to put on my awful hiking clothes
again…and then we went to dinner, on the way south, at a Pizza Hut in
Salem. It was nice to talk to my friend,
who is also a backpacker, and to begin replacing the calories I had used
(borrowed actually).
We arrived at my car at
twilight, exactly 6 days after I had set off.
And we spent much of our
goodbye talking about doing the trail together, with Patricia.
And I spent much of my ride
home feeling ten miles high, feeling accomplished. And all of the problems that I had left at
home – some of which had seemed insurmountable, and had troubled my sleep –
seemed manageable now, doable. And all
of the struggles I had had and all of the loneliness and uncertainty I had
experienced on the trail now seemed somehow cool, somehow vital.
I guess, to sum things up,
that that is why I go backpacking. I
guess that that is why I undertake anything challenging actually.
Sometimes, to affect real
change, you have to get out of your comfort zone…maybe not as far out as I did,
but out nonetheless.
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